In this series, we shine a spotlight 🔦 on the different DEV moderators — Trusted Members and Tag Mods — who help to make DEV a kind, helpful place. Aside from spreading good vibes and helping fellow community members, these folks also assist us with removing spam and keeping posts well organized by adding and removing tags as necessary amongst other things.
If you want to learn more about what these awesome folks do, I recommend checking out our Trusted Member and Tag Moderation guides. There is information about how to apply in both guides if you're interested in joining up as a moderator.
Introducing Pradumna Saraf 🙌
This month, we're featuring Pradumna Saraf, a Developer Advocate for Livecycle, open source enthusiast, and DEV moderator. Pradumna has shared many wonderful posts with the community — in particular, handy git guides and advice around contributing to open source... good stuff for anyone who is looking to get invovled with Hacktoberfest. His skilled writing, helpful advice, and positive attitude are a winning combo in the DevRel world and translate perfectly as moderator skills. We're really lucky and proud to have him in our mod ranks. Thank you, Pradumna!
The Interview
Michael Tharrington: Can you tell us about your developer origin story? How did you first get interested in software development and when did you decide to pursue it as a career?
Pradumna Saraf: It's a long story, but I will try to summarise it. I was a techy person from the very beginning. I used to use my laptop all day, doing random things and experimenting. During high school, we didn't have any curriculum to learn to code. I can't recall how I came across the term "code," but I was always interested in building mobile phone apps. I started my journey in May 2021 by learning Java to build Android apps. My real interest began when I participated in Hacktoberfest and joined some communities. I met lots of people and got curious about the things they built and how they built them. At that time, I knew very little, just basic Android development. I think this curiosity helped me pursue so many things: I started with Android, then switched to web development, then I explored backend development, then I started building CLI tools, and now I am practising DevOps and developing with Golang.
This whole journey of learning and experimenting keeps me more and more curious about tech, and it's not like I decided to pursue it; I just went with the flow. I think when you like something and have a passion, it's good to go with that. And in all this, Open Source was the biggest driving force.
Michael: In your DEV bio, I see that you list yourself as a Dev Advocate 🥑 for Livecycle… can you talk a bit about working as developer advocate, describing what your typical day is like and explaining what you do at Livecycle.
Pradumna: That is really a good question. Dev Advocate or DevRel is a fairly new role in the domain, and it varies from company to company. But in general, the role of a Dev Advocate is to put out the word and advocate for the product and understand what the developers want. In simple terms, it’s a bridge between a developer and a company.
My typical day is filled with a couple of meetings, building the Lifecycle community on Slack, collaborating with projects and people, and creating strategies and content (videos, blogs, short forms for Twitter and LinkedIn) around the product to increase adoption. I heavily focus on the company’s Open Source offering called Preevy which helps create a preview environment using Docker Compose underneath.
My role at Livecycle involves a lot of experiments pushing new ideas to grow our community and adoption, and getting as much feedback as possible to improve the user experience.
Michael: You recently joined on a call with me and various DEV moderators where we discussed using AI to assist with writing (amongst many other things) and how strictly we should moderate it on DEV. Would you be able to share some of your thoughts on using AI both as a writing aid and as a content generation tool?
Pradumna: When talking about AI and content, it's always a subjective question. From my standpoint, moderation is essential. We need to understand that many people invest their time and effort, sometimes weeks, into writing a blog. With AI, similar content can be generated in minutes. It's crucial to prioritize the effort put in by humans.
Yes, on the other hand, for some people, AI is incredibly helpful, especially for non-native speakers or for fixing grammatical errors and typos (like I am doing while writing this sentence).
Regarding complete content generation, I am not in support of that. However, using AI as assistance to help create better content is understandable. Because people connect with humans, not the bots :)
Michael: I know that you’re an open source enthusiast and active across different projects. Can you talk about why you believe open source is important and the OSS projects or organizations that you follow and/or participate in?
Pradumna: I believe in people and the power of community, and Open Source is about people and community. It's really important to understand why believing in Open Source is important; many people don't notice that everything runs on it or that we are using it in some way. When we talk about web development, almost every framework is Open Source, like Vercel, React, Vue, etc., as is the Android operating system and platforms like dev.to. Most of these projects run and exist due to community contributions, and it's really important as a consumer of Open Source to give back to the projects by contributing to them.
I follow a lot of projects from different backgrounds, like Kubernetes, Docker, Preevy my Livecycle etc. But I want to give a special mention to BioDrop from the EddieHub Community. It's an awesome project that helps you connect to your audience with a single link. I'm also a maintainer and focus more on the DevOps side of things.
EddieHub · GitHub
Community of inclusive Open Source people - Collaboration 1st, Code 2nd! Join our GitHub Org 👇 - EddieHub
github.com
Michael: Lastly, how did you get involved as a DEV moderator and what is the most rewarding thing about being a moderator in an online community like ours?
Pradumna: I applied for the moderator role and was selected. I think the most rewarding thing is connecting with people around the world and chatting with them, learning from their perspective, like we did during our last mod call. Because there is so much to learn from people from different backgrounds, knowledge, and experiences. Another perk is staying close to the amazing dev.to team.
Wrap up
Thank you for tuning in to hear about another one of our amazing mods. đź’š
Stay tuned for future mod interviews in this series!
Top comments (3)
Awesome interview and great Mod.
Thank you 🙏
Thank you for featuring, Michael.